Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
In those days there was not a plentiful supply in the town of every book
wanted in the school. The only copy that could be procured of a
"Eutropius," which we ourselves on a particular occasion required, was
one with an English translation at the end. The book was bought, Mr.
Armour stipulating that the English portion of the volume should be sewn
up; in fact, he himself stitched the leaves together.--In Mr. Armour's
time there was, for some reason now forgotten, a barring-out. A pile of
heavy wood (sticks of cordwood whole used then to be thrust into the
great school-room stove) was built against the door within; and the
master had to effect, and did effect, an entrance into his school
through a window on the north side. Mr. Armour became afterwards a
clergyman of the English Church, and officiated for many years in the
township of Cavan.
The master who succeeded Mr. Armour was Dr. Phillips, who came out from
England to take charge of the school. He had been previously master of a
school at Whitchurch, in Herefordshire. His degree was from Cambridge,
where he graduated as a B. A. of Queen's in the year 1805. He was a
venerable-looking man--the very ideal, outwardly, of an English country
parson of an old type--a figure in the general scene, that would have
been taken note of congenially by Fuller or Antony à Wood. The costume
in which he always appeared (shovel-hat included), was that usually
assumed by the senior clergy some years ago. He also wore powder in the
hair except when in mourning. According to the standards of the day, Dr.
Phillips was an accomplished scholar, and a good reader and writer of
English. He introduced into the school at York the English public-school
traditions of the strictest type. His text books were those published
and used at Eton, as Eton then was. The Eton Latin Grammar, without note
or comment, displaced" Ruddiman's Rudiments"--the book to which we had
previously been accustomed, and which really did give hints of something
rational underlying what we learnt out of it. Even the Eton Greek
Grammar, in its purely mediæval untranslated state, made its appearance:
it was through the medium of that very uninviting manual that we
obtained our earliest acquaintance with the first elements of the Greek
tongue. Our "Palæphatus" and other Extracts in the _Græca Minora_ were
translated by us, not into English, but into Latin, in which language
all the notes and elucidations of difficulties in that book were given.
Very many of the Greek "genitives absolute," we remember, were to be
rendered by _quum_, with a subjunctive pluperfect--an enormous mystery
to us at the time. Our Lexicon was _Schrevelius_, as yet un-Englished.
For the Greek Testament we had "Dawson," a vocabulary couched in the
Latin tongue, notwithstanding the author's name. The chevaux-de-frise
set up across the pathways to knowledge were numerous and most
forbidding. The Latin translation, line for line, at the end of Clarke's
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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